Mystique #4:

This is True Love

People who write to each other on the Internet describe the experience as a melding of the minds. It is similar to how a person might fall in love with a character in a movie or a book. The big difference here is that people are interacting with living, breathing individuals who think, speak, feel, and experience life as they do.

Because they share so many things in common with the other person, they feel a special connection to them -- one that they may never have felt with anyone else. It is this special connection and the intense, emotional interactions they have that people say makes them feel like they have fallen in love with their online partner.

Sometimes, people cannot adequately describe what it is they are feeling, but they do recognize that they never felt this way before. They cannot wait to get back online to talk to their partner. They get butterflies every time they go to their electronic mailbox and see a new letter from them. They feel sympathy for their partner's failures and jubilation for their partner's triumphs.

Everything they feel for a person they have never met feels like the real thing -- even if they never felt it before.

The #4 Mystique of the Internet is that people can fall in love with someone they have never met in person and have a relationship in cyberspace that is every bit as real as the real world.